Radio essay
The radio essay is a non-fictional radio genre that, after 1945 , has established itself alongside radio plays and features in the cultural programs of radio broadcasting in various European countries. The radio essay combines the tradition of the print essay from the newspaper and magazine section with the technical potential of the electronic mass media, in particular the assembly and distribution of the narrator position among several speakers.
Emergence
The name radio essay was introduced in Germany by Alfred Andersch . In 1955, Andersch founded the “Radio Essay Editing” at Süddeutscher Rundfunk Stuttgart (SDR). It existed parallel to the radio play and music editing and was responsible for radio essays and features. All other West German broadcasters, on the other hand, stayed with the separation into “feature” and “radio play” editors. The direct model for an editorial highlighting of non-fictional genres in the cultural program was the BBC's “Third Program” .
With the naming "Radio-Essay" the SDR referred to Jean Tardieu's Club d'Essai at the Radiodiffusion Française and at the same time linked the broadcast format with the literary tradition of the essay. For Andersch, the experimental potential was also decisive - for him, the essay (of course, it refers to the original meaning of the word “essai” or “essay”) had the “character of a lively character of the experiment that kept all possibilities open. “The Radio-Essay editorial team at SDR existed until June 1981 (until Andersch's successor Helmut Heißenbüttel retired ). It still exists today in the SWR that resulted from the merger of SDR and SWF. The radio essay is still one of the established broadcasting formats in public broadcasting, but independent editorial offices apart from SWR only exist at Deutschlandfunk and BR.
In terms of media history, the radio essay and radio feature stand at the beginning of a series of new essayistic genres in electronic mass media that have the principle of montage in common: above all, essay film, documentary and multimedia forms of the digital age, especially the weblog, are to be mentioned .
shape
As a non-fictional radio genre, the radio essay stands formally between radio play and radio feature , because it can be characterized by both the montage of original sounds and quotes as well as dialogue. However, the historical radio essay editorial team at Süddeutscher Rundfunk particularly emphasized the similarities between radio essay and feature. In the announcement text for the new "Radio-Essay" series, Andersch and the then director of the SDR, Fritz Eberhard, write :
“Language has only developed a few new forms in the medium of radio; actually only two: the big (sports) report and the radio play. […] In the last few years something new has happened in Germany and in other countries. A small group of authors went in search of forms that would allow them to depict political, social and spiritual problems, personalities and groups of people, countries and landscapes, and even psychological, sociological and historical phenomena on the radio. In the language laboratories of these authors, models were created that correspond to the technical laws of radio. "
In addition to the feature, these experimental forms also include the radio essay, the spectrum of which ranged from monological examples to polyphonic staging to dialogues in the tradition of the “dialogue essay”. Despite the predominant polyphony of different speaking voices, there is mostly a continuous speaker figure. Other voices next to her speak quotes, ask rhetorical questions or provide data and facts. At the moment, radio essays in German-language radio cultural programs are more monologically structured, even if there are definitely changes of speakers.
Research history
Essay research has so far paid little attention to the essayistic formats in modern mass media, for example in the extensive and current Encyclopedia of the Essay (1999) neither the terms radio essay nor radio feature can be found. In contrast to the case of the radio play, literary studies did not feel responsible for a long time. In representations of the modern essay, the radio essay was only treated as a journalistic version or even a "pseudo-essay".
The West German literary scholar Christa Hülsebus-Wagner described the radio essay as a “literary form of expression” and as a special “art form” in 1981 in a work on “ Radio Forms of Group 47 and its Surroundings”. Findings from other areas also point to the relevance of the radio essay, such as Wolfgang Müller-Funk's observation that the essay is a “ubiquitous” (ie ubiquitous) form of expression of modernity and penetrates the “deep structures of literary and philosophical texts” .
Examples
- Ingeborg Bachmann : Utopia versus ideology. Robert Musil's man without qualities. Broadcast on April 1, 1955 (RB)
- Heinrich Böll : Léon Bloy. Existence in God and in poverty. Broadcast on August 5, 1952, (HR)
- Walter Jens : riot and poetry. Georg Büchner or The Illness of the Century. Broadcast on February 5, 1956 (SDR)
- Wolfgang Koeppen : A rag from the bull skin. Impressions from Spain . Broadcast on April 13, 1956 (SDR)
- Arno Schmidt : 1770–1870 Heinrich Albert Oppermann's time and life pictures from three generations. Broadcast on February 27, 1959 (SDR)
- Hubert Fichte : Concrete Anthropology (1) records from Bahia. Broadcast on October 4, 1976 (SDR).
- Gregory Whitehead : Shake, Rattle, Roll. Broadcast of a German version on August 18, 1993 (SR).
- Kathrin Röggla : a presumptuous catalog for Mr. Fichte. Broadcast on May 16, 2006 (BR).
- Jörg Albrecht : Fiction Victims. Broadcast on June 23, 2015 (BR).
- Clemens Meyer . In the spider woman's web. Or: 10 attempts via the NSU. (SWR2)
literature
- Bruno Berger: The essay. Form and history. Bern / Munich 1964
- Monika Boll: Night program. Intellectual founding debates in the early Federal Republic. Munster 2004
- Tracy Chevalier (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Essay. London 1997
- Hermann Glaser, Hans Jürgen Koch: All ears. A cultural history of radio in Germany. Cologne 2005
- Brigitte Grimm, Jörg Hucklenbroich: Radio Essay 1955-1981: List of manuscripts and audio documents. Stuttgart 1996
- Christa Hülsebus-Wagner: Feature and radio essay: Radio forms by authors of Group 47 and their circle. Aachen 1983
- Stephan Krass: The great radio culture machine http://www.swr.de/swr2/kultur-info/60-jahre-radio-essay/-/id=9597116/did=15724142/nid=9597116/1jxbysd/index.html
- Edgar Lersch: The radio essay editors at Süddeutscher Rundfunk 1955-1981 in the context of radio history. In: Süddeutscher Rundfunk (Hrsg.): Documentation and Archives. Historical archive and word documentation. Volume 5. Stuttgart 1996. pp. 7–13 ( online as a PDF document at www.mediaculture-online.de )
- Wolfgang Müller-Funk: Experience and Experiment. Studies on the theory and history of essayism. Berlin 1995
- Robert Prot: Jean Tardieu et la nouvelle radio. Paris 2006
- Ansgar Warner: "Fight against ghosts." The radio essays Wolfgang Koeppens and Arno Schmidts in the night program of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk as a critical memory medium. Bielefeld 2007
- Michael Lissek : What does the essay do? A-tone! Program writing of the feature & radio play editorial team of SWR 2